1. Technical Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a transferring apparatus for transferring a carried product, a carrying apparatus, and a transferring method.
2. Description of the Related Art
Recently, as so-called IT industry has developed, various electronic devices such as semiconductor devices and liquid crystal display devices have been developed. For manufacturing the electronic devices, for example, the semiconductor devices, processing apparatuses for performing processes such as photolithography, film formation, etching and cleaning processes and carrying apparatuses for carrying substrates or substrate wafers between the processing apparatuses are used.
For the carrying apparatus, since it is necessary to prepare a facility capable of obtaining carrying amounts needed to efficiently produce the devices in the manufacturing facility capable of obtaining product amounts corresponding to demands for the devices, various types of carrying apparatuses capable of efficiently performing carrying have been developed. Recently, since the tendency of the production changes from limit-type mass production to wide-type small production, suitable carrying apparatuses have been contrived and methods of carrying the wafers one by one have been proposed. Specifically, the carrying apparatus comprises, for example, a conveyor between processing apparatuses for processing the semiconductor wafers and the length of the conveyor is predetermined to cope with the demands for the semiconductor devices (for example, see Japanese Unexamined Patent Application Publication No. 2001-233450 (see FIG. 1)).
When there arises a need to increase production according to the change of the demands forecast of the semiconductor devices, there is a need to add manufacturing apparatuses for ensuring the production and carrying apparatuses for carrying wafers or substrates between the added manufacturing apparatuses as well as between the existing and added carrying apparatuses. However, the conventional conveyor has a problem in that it cannot be easily added because it is impossible to transfer the semiconductor wafers between the existing and added conveyors.
Accordingly, an object of the present invention is to provide a transferring apparatus, a carrying apparatus, and a transferring method for solving the above problems and facilitating extension of carrying apparatuses.